Microsoft announced today that it has made a new Test Drive site for its its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 Mobile release, part of Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”. This isn’t for testing your own apps per se—you can do that with the version of IE 9 Mobile that’s available in the free Windows Phone developer tools. Instead, the Internet Explorer 9 Mobile Test Drive site is modeled after the previous IE 9 Test Drive, which focused on the desktop browser. It provides a way to test IE 9 Mobile features in the mobile browser, and see what’s possible with this exciting new web platform.

It’s organized essentially the same way as the original, except laid out to be easily read and used on the mobile form factor. We’ve ported over some of the more popular samples from the full version of the IE Test Drive and have developed a few of our own mobile-specific ones too, including the demos that Joe Belfiore showed at MIX 11 earlier this year. It’s important to note that even though we use the same core rendering engines on both the desktop and mobile versions of IE and adhere to the concept of “same markup” when we produce our samples, we felt that it was worth creating a mobile test drive site to illustrate how we approach some of the key issues that developers face when creating mobile-optimized content: screen sizes, device capabilities, etc.

Over the coming months leading up to the release of Windows Phone “Mango” and beyond, we will be adding new samples to the Mobile Test Drive for you to try out, and will announce them here on the blog when we do.

One Response to Internet Explorer 9 Mobile Test Drive now available

Joe B really lives in another world. Its like he forgot all about the current incomplete state of his platform and has no sense of urgency. I mean who cares about this crazy site when absolutely no wp7 owner outside his dev team and partners can get a hold of ei9 mobile and won’t be at least until 2012 if you’re on ATT. I guess today all it does is allowing you to realize how crappy the current browser is (something which surely does wonders for your platform). He speaks of this thing as if you could download it tomorrow. I just watched one of his demo on the programs list jump list and he acknowledges how much more useful it is…well Joe why can’t you release that now?